1. Field of the Invention
An aspect of this disclosure relates to a device, a program management method, and a storage medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2008-084304, for example, discloses an image forming apparatus including a platform (hereafter called an application platform) for executing application programs. The disclosed image forming apparatus allows the user to install application programs suitable for the user environment as plug-ins to add functions. Hereafter, such application programs may be called “plug-in applications”.
Unlike the case of a personal computer (PC), it is generally not desirable to request the user of an image forming apparatus to manually start a plug-in application each time when using a function. Therefore, functions of an image forming apparatus need to be available immediately after its start-up. For this reason, typically, plug-in applications are automatically started by the application platform during the start-up of the image forming apparatus (i.e., when the power is turned on).
Meanwhile, compared with a PC, the amount of memory of an image forming apparatus is generally kept small to reduce the costs. Also in an image forming apparatus, “swapping” is normally not performed to improve the performance of plug-in applications. Accordingly, compared with a PC, an image forming apparatus is more likely to run out of memory.
Assuming that plug-in applications are newly installed in a normally-operating image forming apparatus and the image forming apparatus is restarted, the image forming apparatus may run out of memory during the start-up process of the plug-in applications, and the start-up of the application platform itself may fail. If the application platform is not running on an image forming apparatus, it is not possible to use (or execute) plug-in applications. Also, since the function to uninstall plug-in applications is implemented by the application platform, it may not be possible to uninstall the plug-in applications. In such a case, it is difficult to solve the problem by restarting the image forming apparatus because the out of memory condition described above may occur repeatedly.